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The "Man" and "Woman" dilemma in furry
3 years ago
General
The more worldbuilding I do, the more difficulty I have in adhering to my rules of banned words and terms.
When I first got started in this fandom, like many of the worst of you, I tried to use cutesy terms in place of 'human' ones, paws instead of hands (I actually do kind of miss that, it's a cuter word, what can I say), footpaw, 'furs' instead of people, mate (groan, seriously, stop saying this, you're not an animal, you're an ugly human and your love is very likely finite, deal with it) and whatever else. Over time, I retired much of that, as I wanted my worldbuilding efforts to take themselves a little more seriously, but also because it was becoming a practical nightmare.
And two of the longest running holdouts, terms I still try to avoid using, present perhaps the biggest challenge of all: Man and Woman.
For me, these were essentially the first thing prohibited, I mean, they're such human-specific terms, and if you've ever seen me rant about your stupid "hi my name is josh or Aiden or Kyle or some shit like that" human-like hair on your anthro characters then you know I try to keep that stuff very separate.
But one thing you'll find if you try and erase the word "Man" from your lexicon is that you lock yourself out of a LOT of words, terms, and slang.
"Oh man" is gone.
"Hey man" is gone.
Every word ending is "man" or "men" is gone (Servicemen, Gunman, Weatherman, etc.)
And like...sigh...I've just outgrown saying shit like "weatherfur" you know? I endeavor to put together a world that serves to do more than be like "Hey furries, like how cuuuuuuuuuuute I'm being! Are you seeing how cute and quirky and kawaii this all is?!" And sticking 'fur' on shit plays right into that.
What's funny is that I'm fine with "Boy" and "Girl" which, technically, should only prefer to non-adult humans of a male or female gender but perhaps because even we has humans use the terms so freely to refer to both adults and kids, AND frequently use it to refer to other species (Oh, you got a cat? Boy or girl?), so, I guess I'm already conditioned to view that as a less strict term that can be all encompassing.
With that in mind, I recognize that in many ways, I should stop being so strict about "Man" and "Woman" because one could strongly argue that in a world will multiples species to account for, an all-encompassing term for adults would be useful, such as in situations where there's an anonymity involved, or perhaps for legal reasons. Yes, "male" and "female" exist as terms and they work okay if you're trying to lean harder into the whole "ha ha, get it? 'cause animals?" thing. But frankly, they can be pretty clunky when attempting to slot them into slang or other terms. And to those ends, I've very slowly experimented with sneaking the word man into areas. For example, in his interview with Nara, my Zane character refers to his father as his 'old man' because I just couldn't get that out of my head, Zane would be the kind of folksy boy to use that term and "my old guy" or "my old dude" just doesn't carry the same connotations, you KNOW what I mean (actually you don't because you're not still reading this).
Now the weird thing is, I can kind of dip my toe into use of the word 'man' but I run into more problems with "woman" and I think the reason for that is because the term "man" is used in such a universal, generic way, it's easier to imagine slotting into other uses, even for an anthroverse but "woman" is not nearly as universal, pretty much only ever referring to just that, adult, human females. And I'm sure there's a conversation to be had here about the defaultizing of masculine terms over female terms, presenting men and masculinity as something of a 'given' while a term like "woman" is on its own, isolated little island not dissimilar from efforts to do the same with women themselves and shut them out of as many facets of society as possible, but, I'll save that conversation for some other time when I need to bitch about how men are invariably trash.
But I am running into an issue as I write out the bio for this most recent character of mine, kind of a reverse issue in a way because while "Women" in context of anthros is weird to me, "Women's Wrestling" as a term to refer to, y'know, women's wreslting, is a very common to me and "Females' Wrestling" frankly, sounds weird, and almost strangely derogatory, probably due to all those jackass incels who insist on using the term "female" as a means of dehumanizing women, making them sound more like a creature than a person...which kinda ties into what I said earlier about doing it for anthros with the specific goal of dehumanizing them but in a different way, hey, so interesting...but anyway, yeah, "females' wrestling' doesn't sound very good and I've got it jotted currently but...I dunno man, I might bite the bullet and switch it over to "women" before it gets posted.
Anyway. I dunno where I'm going with this. But I guess I just figured I ramble about that weird little dilemma of mine for a while, while the rest of you think to yourselves "didn't he start posting a little bit of porn again the last week or two? Why did that stop?"
When I first got started in this fandom, like many of the worst of you, I tried to use cutesy terms in place of 'human' ones, paws instead of hands (I actually do kind of miss that, it's a cuter word, what can I say), footpaw, 'furs' instead of people, mate (groan, seriously, stop saying this, you're not an animal, you're an ugly human and your love is very likely finite, deal with it) and whatever else. Over time, I retired much of that, as I wanted my worldbuilding efforts to take themselves a little more seriously, but also because it was becoming a practical nightmare.
And two of the longest running holdouts, terms I still try to avoid using, present perhaps the biggest challenge of all: Man and Woman.
For me, these were essentially the first thing prohibited, I mean, they're such human-specific terms, and if you've ever seen me rant about your stupid "hi my name is josh or Aiden or Kyle or some shit like that" human-like hair on your anthro characters then you know I try to keep that stuff very separate.
But one thing you'll find if you try and erase the word "Man" from your lexicon is that you lock yourself out of a LOT of words, terms, and slang.
"Oh man" is gone.
"Hey man" is gone.
Every word ending is "man" or "men" is gone (Servicemen, Gunman, Weatherman, etc.)
And like...sigh...I've just outgrown saying shit like "weatherfur" you know? I endeavor to put together a world that serves to do more than be like "Hey furries, like how cuuuuuuuuuuute I'm being! Are you seeing how cute and quirky and kawaii this all is?!" And sticking 'fur' on shit plays right into that.
What's funny is that I'm fine with "Boy" and "Girl" which, technically, should only prefer to non-adult humans of a male or female gender but perhaps because even we has humans use the terms so freely to refer to both adults and kids, AND frequently use it to refer to other species (Oh, you got a cat? Boy or girl?), so, I guess I'm already conditioned to view that as a less strict term that can be all encompassing.
With that in mind, I recognize that in many ways, I should stop being so strict about "Man" and "Woman" because one could strongly argue that in a world will multiples species to account for, an all-encompassing term for adults would be useful, such as in situations where there's an anonymity involved, or perhaps for legal reasons. Yes, "male" and "female" exist as terms and they work okay if you're trying to lean harder into the whole "ha ha, get it? 'cause animals?" thing. But frankly, they can be pretty clunky when attempting to slot them into slang or other terms. And to those ends, I've very slowly experimented with sneaking the word man into areas. For example, in his interview with Nara, my Zane character refers to his father as his 'old man' because I just couldn't get that out of my head, Zane would be the kind of folksy boy to use that term and "my old guy" or "my old dude" just doesn't carry the same connotations, you KNOW what I mean (actually you don't because you're not still reading this).
Now the weird thing is, I can kind of dip my toe into use of the word 'man' but I run into more problems with "woman" and I think the reason for that is because the term "man" is used in such a universal, generic way, it's easier to imagine slotting into other uses, even for an anthroverse but "woman" is not nearly as universal, pretty much only ever referring to just that, adult, human females. And I'm sure there's a conversation to be had here about the defaultizing of masculine terms over female terms, presenting men and masculinity as something of a 'given' while a term like "woman" is on its own, isolated little island not dissimilar from efforts to do the same with women themselves and shut them out of as many facets of society as possible, but, I'll save that conversation for some other time when I need to bitch about how men are invariably trash.
But I am running into an issue as I write out the bio for this most recent character of mine, kind of a reverse issue in a way because while "Women" in context of anthros is weird to me, "Women's Wrestling" as a term to refer to, y'know, women's wreslting, is a very common to me and "Females' Wrestling" frankly, sounds weird, and almost strangely derogatory, probably due to all those jackass incels who insist on using the term "female" as a means of dehumanizing women, making them sound more like a creature than a person...which kinda ties into what I said earlier about doing it for anthros with the specific goal of dehumanizing them but in a different way, hey, so interesting...but anyway, yeah, "females' wrestling' doesn't sound very good and I've got it jotted currently but...I dunno man, I might bite the bullet and switch it over to "women" before it gets posted.
Anyway. I dunno where I'm going with this. But I guess I just figured I ramble about that weird little dilemma of mine for a while, while the rest of you think to yourselves "didn't he start posting a little bit of porn again the last week or two? Why did that stop?"
Same goes for hands and feet. I do use 'paw' and such occasionally, but not every time. They're flavour words that are used judiciously.
And I briefly considered just making up brand new names for all the places even if their languages/mannerisms were largely the same but as you suggested, that'd just get too weird and hold people up (Not that anyone's reading this shit) and frankly, trying to come up with a new name for a spin-off of an existing foreign land without sounding racist in the process is a can of worms I opted to avoid pouring onto my own head. But the thing is, I still kind of half-assedly adhere to that rule about geographic locations in a lot of my other work, even though it's all meant to be a connected universe, so I guess you could say it's kind of a semi-connected universe. Characters from one set of stories/concepts might reference characters from others, even though the rules of their individual worlds might differ slightly.
Also in the case of "hands," that was partially because of words like "Handle" or the phrase "Hand me that." It pretty much demanded that the phrase "hand" exist. I consider making it a term that differs depending on the specific anatomy of a given species hand-parts. Like, if there's bare-skinned maybe they're hands, if they're furry and/or include paw pads, they're paws but...that's...work. And still doesn't solve the issue of the phrases that assume all things are hands.
First off, furries calling themselves 'furs' doesn't really make any more sense than humans calling themselves 'skins'. Also, the ubiquity of paw symbols on furry art is weird, because that'd be like everything humans own having foot symbols, which doesn't happen unless you're in the Foot clan from TMNT :P But I digress.
So it never really made sense to copy/paste 'fur' anywhere you see the word 'man' to begin with, IMO. The purpose of 'man' and 'woman', linguistically, is to use a gendered form of the word 'person'. So to me, it makes sense for furries to also use the words 'man' and 'woman' as gendered versions of the word 'person'. You could argue that 'person' refers to a human (don't get me started on 'furson', ick) but I think in a furry world 'person' just refers to a sentient entity. That's how they would use the language; as humans looking at this furry world, we're hung up on the word 'fur', but they wouldn't be.
Language expands and adapts based on the people speaking it. There is nothing innately human about 'man', 'woman', 'person', or even words like 'hand'. Your writing will read perfectly well if you use these words, and honestly will be less jarring than trying to shove the word 'fur' in every 5 seconds. That said, I still tend to prefer to use the word 'paw' over 'hand', I'll admit that it's one I do a whole lot. Because that one is cuter :)
Anyway while I agree that 'furs' would be dumb in theory, I feel like I have to at least defend it a little if only due to the number of words in the English language that are fucking stupid and lazy.
For example - fly. Like, the insect. It's called a fly. Let's think about this for a minute, that's think about the process of naming this thing for the first time. "Oh for god - it's one of those things again, I dunno let's call it a, a...a fly, it's a fly, it flies, right? We'll...we'll come up with something better, later."
And then of course we never did. And there are any number of words and terms just like that. So while I agree, collectively naming the collective populous itself seems like it would require something a little more...prestigious than 'fur' I would not put it past a sentient collective to just say, fuck it, that's the word, we'll circle back to it someday.
Similarly, for the "hands", it is not human-relared, but means a prehensile extremity (maybe except tails or tongues). FFS, octopi tentacles ARE called "hands" for example. So yeah, when someone uses a "paw", they might mean whatever, but it reads like they have major issues HANDling objects :) ... Maybe except PAWning them.
(Ok, that was one fuck of a bad pun, and I do have to apologize for posdible cringe it causes.)
I split the difference and genericized the hand and foot issue. Hooved animals, split or not, use hoof for hand and trotter for foot, as they have a different finger construction with hoof caps. Pawed mammals use hand and paw.
Gendering uses some of the many terms that history has delivered. Feliforms of all types use queen to refer to women of their kind, justifiable as them simply holding on to an old word, quean. Rodents, rabbits and deer all have buck and doe. All cattlekind has bull and cow. Anything hooved can use mare and stallion, like zebras, ovines have ram and ewe, caprines have billy and nanny.
But still, that doesn't cover everything. At least if you deal with mammals you can use that. Insert mammal as the generic. I hate that English got rid of the three forms. There were dedicated words for just humanity in general. I know in Greek it's andro for men, gyno for woman, and anthropos for mankind. I think in Latin it's vir, femina, and homo.
But you're right, it gets to be a lot. And you bite the bullet fairly early.
It otherwise takes a total linguistic genesis/construct, which could be a very fun project, if one that would take a long time to immerse yourself in and adjust to.
Or have "Human" be a word for everyone sapient, and if you get all sci-fi say everybody was once human but been gene spliced since or something.
Unless you have to specifically reference someone's sex/gender, but then "male"/"female" work even if the species-specific ones don't for some reason.